The appearance of Mark Hutchinson's Calvinism, Reform and the Absolutist State in Elizabethan Ireland is a welcome thing. Scholars have long realized that there is something important about the way English political culture found expression in Tudor Ireland. In short, the way Englishmen acted in the sister kingdom and the way they practiced government there, while obviously affected by the particular challenges they faced, disclosed otherwise undeclared assumptions in English political thinking. The queen's officers in Ireland have often been crudely characterized as nasty, brutish, and, in the case of Sir Richard Bingham, short. Thankfully Hutchinson, although he sees their understanding of sovereignty as but “one step behind Hobbes's Leviathan” (64), avoids such condescension. There are no caricatures here, although there may be a tendency to see too much consensus.

Hutchinson's complex argument seeks to present Ireland as a crucible for developing concepts of the state in the anglophone world. While he seeks to chart the development of an emerging Calvinist ideology concerning government in Tudor Ireland, arguing that historians have neglected the evangelical motive in government there, his preeminent concern is the desire to make an intervention in the broader history of European early modern political thought, especially as related and narrated by Quentin Skinner in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought (1978). To this end Hutchinson proposes that English use of the abstract term the state occurred precociously in Ireland and suggests, to use a term he does not employ himself, the occurrence of something of a paradigm shift in English thinking on faith and government over the 1570s, 1580s and 1590s, a shift that, he argues, achieved form and clarity in Ireland. His explanation of this phenomenon is complex. He surmises that the English officers and magistrates who administered the regime in the sister kingdom were suffused in Calvinist modes of thinking, which led them to come to a broad consensus that Ireland had failed as a godly community and that the consciences of the Irish, both Gaelic-Irish and English-Irish, were inherently corrupt. Consequently, they came to deem the Irish incapable of receiving efficient grace and thus sought to hold aloof from Ireland's totally depraved polity. In the absence of a community of conscience and grace, all that was left to the English servitors was the maintenance of the state, abstractly conceived. But this was not merely a reaction to their environment, “Irish government,” he precipitately asserts, “clearly took its cue at some level from the French political philosopher Jean Bodin and the absolutist position detailed in his Six Books of the Commonwealth” (64) Central to Hutchinson's thesis is the notion that because of this gravitational pull, the use made of the term the state by Her Majesty's officers in Ireland drew a clear distinction between a more institutional sense of abstract sovereign authority and the actual person of the prince. Hutchinson, in a further assertion, suggests that they were brought to the use of this formula because “the prince's distance from the island meant [that] any sense of lèse majesté was significantly diminished, because it was the deputy's and council's authority, not the prince's, that was being discussed or exercised, giving room for more radical thinking to emerge” and because “the prince was absent and the polity was thought to be corrupt. … [s]overeignty had to be located within the high offices of state, namely the institutions of government” (64). As a result, Hutchinson argues, what issued was a working absolutist concept of the state distinct from both the wider political community and the prince that did not require the same evangelical engagement as did the godly notions that had obtained hitherto.

While Hutchinson's work is based on readings of primary and secondary source material, it is fair to say that his question framing is undertaken predominantly with reference to secondary-source concerns—especially relatively recent works related to the history of political though. Consequently, the primary-source component of his thesis does not drive the pace of the argument and therefore has more of a supporting role. Historiographies and historians' theses are juxtaposed suggestively, and speculative glosses are put forward, but the correlations, while evocative, can occasionally seem underpowered. On the Irish side, one can discern the usual suspects here—Brendan Bradshaw, Ciaran Brady, Nicholas Canny, and Hiram Morgan—but one can also, in a welcome development, make out how two more recent monographs, Enforcing the English Reformation in Ireland by James Murray (2009) and my own Martial Power and Elizabethan political culture (2009) have made an impact on Hutchinson's thinking. His account of Lord Deputy Sidney's religious agenda in the 1570s draws on Murray's account of that viceroy's distinctive, authoritarian, high-commission-driven assertion of prerogative rule over the state church. It is very much to Hutchinson's credit that he realizes the significance of Murray's work (itself a monograph that deserves greater notice than it has enjoyed hitherto). Similarly, Hutchinson's argument about crown servitors' abstraction of “state” power resembles in some ways my own argument that English military captains operating as servitors in Ireland adopted an inflated, absolutistic, but abstracted view of the royal imperium and frequently claimed competence to wield it because they believed it had been delegated to them by the queen, often by commission.

By contrast, Hutchinson asserts that the Irish governmental apparatus, or at least the high offices of state imagined themselves to be the locus of sovereignty in Ireland. But this assertion overreaches beyond what the primary source material for this period suggests, underestimating the centrality of the queen's imperium and its delegation in the prevailing political theology that obtained in Elizabethan Ireland. While the term the state came to be used in Ireland in the 1570s and even before, it tended to describe an apparatus of government that was self-consciously derived from the monarch by delegation and largely financed by her money rather than anything that could be deemed autonomous from the crown. Of course, the distance between the reality of Irish government in Dublin and the center of power in Whitehall or Greenwich caused tensions between the sovereign and her delegates, but this usually issued in a stronger rhetorical identification of government actions with the queen, the fetishization of monarchical authority in Ireland by her delegates, and the continual invocation of Elizabeth's authority rather than any stated or insinuated alienation from the sovereign. Furthermore, the reality of the snake pit of Irish politics meant that day-to-day life as a civil and ecclesiastical officer in Ireland, especially as a viceroy, entailed constant vulnerability not only to denunciation by fellow officers but also to opportunistic political hostility at the hands of the queen's Irish subjects. In this environment any suggestion that one's sense of “lèse majesté” had been “diminished” (64) would give his opponents enough ammunition to denounce him to the queen or her officers of state in England and thereby facilitate and likely guarantee his downfall—Calvinist orthodoxy was much less of a sine qua non. Finally, a Bodinian provenance was not needed for the expression of absolutist styles of thought in Ireland. Developments in Roman legal thought as well as a homegrown Henrician register of imperial discourse had already facilitated a spectrum of English absolutisms that could run the gamut from mild to unfettered. Yes, much of the reality of day-to-day government in Ireland escaped metropolitan oversight, but its royal provenance, its status as Her Majesty's government, was crowed all the more noisily for that. Ultimately, all officers rendered account in one way or other to their sporadically attentive queen, the fount of their authority.